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iain's avatar
May 8Edited

When I was studying STEM subjects for my A-Levels, not accepting anything until I'd understood it was really rewarding. I was forced to constantly go back to prior principles, and so on.

But I went on to study law, and things got messy. I kept getting sucked into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, searching for stable foundations to ground my claims about society, politics, morality, human nature (all of which are deeply implicated in the law, even if they are hidden in the background). Although we were given Hobbes' argument in our very first lecture, I couldn't even convince myself that a state and its laws were truly necessary for social order. (To this day I'm still a bit of an anarchist). Moreover, I was convinced that legal concepts were "transcendental nonsense", as one American jurist put it. Reasoning from precedent seemed extremely shoddy. Judges seemed all too human. Value judgments and political preferences abound disguised in "legal reasoning". Frustratingly, there were hardly any "first principles" one could speak of, beyond modern day commitments to "democracy" or "economic efficiency". To study law required that I bracket off my concerns about the assumptions underpinning much of the field.

Example concerns that get buried: What even is law? The sentences on the statute, the meanings in one's head, or the rights in some imagined legal universe? How should we understand society—the realm of law's application and origin? How might we think clearly about the law today, given our growing understanding that humans lack the kind of characteristics assumed in Enlightenment humanism and liberal individualism?

Ultimately, social reality is such a massive, incomprehensible totality where everything is chaotically intertwined, unlike mathematics/science where you can advance your understanding in little, isolated chunks at a time with reasonable confidence. In sociology, you can spend years investigating Marxist theories only to decide that "ideology" or "base/superstructure" are not theoretically fruitful terms.

Not sure where I am going with this comment so I'll just leave it here as a reflection on the applicability of "not accepting what you don't understand" to certain domains. Sometimes it pays to just start writing without obsessively reading Russell, Frege, Quine, and Davidson to figure out how sentences have meaning...

*Note: Edited for cleaner writing.

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Sanvaad's avatar

I love how you reframe intelligence as more about habits and character - the willingness to look stupid by asking questions, the drive to really understand rather than just get the "right answer," and the patience to examine things from multiple angles. The contrast between stopping at the first proof versus finding multiple approaches is such a clear illustration of this. Your examples of the equals sign and the brick story are perfect reminders that even seemingly simple things contain depths when we're willing to look closer and think longer. It's a refreshing perspective on what real understanding requires.

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